“I go, ‘Really? Are you kidding? Really?’” Carter said. “I would never change my date. My babies will know what day they were born. They’ll understand and get it and realize that it might have been a tragic day for the world, but they’re still very blessed to be here … and they know now at 10 how very lucky they are to be here.”

“He said, ‘I can’t get through, I can’t get through,’ And I said, ‘Well, you really need to get here. They’re going to take these babies,’” she added. “He just barely got there. And that is when the second plane hit the second tower. They had just gotten me into the room. And I remember my mom and my dad were there. And we were watching the TV. And we watched the plane hit the second tower.”

Looking back on that day 10 years ago, one word comes to Carter’s mind.

“Bittersweet is the word I always use.”

She says now her son, in particular, has a keen interest in 9/11.

“What astonishes me most is he really wants to go there. He says he wants to be able to touch where Ground Zero was. Make sure that that really was the place and that place really exists,” she said. “Because he hears about it, but he’s never really seen it. And I think that’s what is for him. He just wants to see it.”

And every year on September 11, “My son will always say – my daughter will too – ‘Mom, you’ve got to put the flag out. And they remind me or they put the flag out. They’re pretty great kids.”

Steve Miller is an investigative reporter and has been with Newsradio for more than two decades. He grew up in South Texas and received his undergraduate degree in Liberal Arts at the University of Texas in Austin. After graduation, he moved to...